Global collaborations key to solving research and environmental challenges

Pardee lab member Justin Vigar addresses delegates at Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Convention on Biodiversity in Cali, Colombia

As researcher and delegate to UN Convention on Biodiversity, Justin Vigar emphasizes importance of international relationships

When Justin Vigar started his PhD at U of T’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, he knew that his research to develop tools to improve global health needed to be conducted alongside researchers from other countries and cultures in collaborative projects.

Working with supervisor Keith Pardee, Vigar used synthetic biology to create affordable, portable diagnostic tools that can be used outside of conventional laboratory settings to improve health care accessibility.

“We saw a lot of synergy from working directly with people across the Global South. Forming these relationships and collaborating with graduate students from around the world made it possible to refine this technology and make it work well in practice,” says Vigar. “We couldn't have done this work on our own in Toronto. We really relied on their input and expertise.”

Vigar started his PhD with Pardee, associate professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, in 2020. Pardee and his team use synthetic biology – a field that combines engineering and biotechnology – to develop low-cost diagnostic and drug manufacturing tools that can be deployed to remote and rural areas and lower-income countries to allow people in these areas to access higher-quality health care.

In one area of their research program, Pardee’s team has embedded biological circuitry onto paper to diagnose diseases, including Ebola and Zika, with minimal processing.  

“We’ve been working with partners in the Global South now for almost ten years, and these efforts have allowed the team collectively to achieve things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise,” says Pardee. “Building research capacity in life science research and biotechnology is crucial to ensure equity in health access and that the prosperity from participating in the bioeconomy can be realized broadly.”

In 2020, the Pardee team pivoted and applied the same technology to develop portable COVID-19 diagnostic tools. Vigar, who grew up in rural Alberta, understood the importance of accessible diagnostic tools and was eager to work with the team on this research.

“The Pardee lab has a history of working on global health challenges and epidemics, so they were uniquely positioned to tackle some of the challenges of COVID-19, especially in remote and rural areas,” says Vigar. “We already had these networks in Latin America and India because of our work with other diseases, so it was a natural fit to work with those partners to adapt the platform technologies we had already developed for tropical infectious diseases to diagnose COVID-19.”

During Vigar’s PhD, he worked with collaborators in South America on expanding the diagnostic tools to additional infectious diseases, including dengue and leishmaniasis, and ensuring researchers in low-resource settings can use the tools.

Students from Pardee’s lab have been testing the tools in different areas of South America, and in the fall of 2024, Vigar travelled to Colombia and worked with colleagues from the Universidad de Los Andes to test the tools with patient samples of dengue and COVID-19 from a children’s clinic in the Huila region of southern Colombia. The results have not yet been published, but Vigar says the project demonstrated that the system could be built and transported to remote locations and provides comparable diagnosis to qPCR, the gold standard for diagnosis.

“The success of this project was due to the networks we built with groups from around the world, and we've worked very closely together,” he says.

PhD research discussed at UN conference

Vigar has had a long interest in nature conservation and in the intersection of environmental, animal and human health.

He has served as a delegate to the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Convention on Biodiversity (UNCBD) three times, first in 2018 and most recently at COP16, in Cali, Colombia, in early November, after completing the work on the patient trial in Bogota. The meeting encompasses a broad range of topics ties to conservation, including governance of digital DNA sequence information and genetically modified organisms, both of which are integral to biotechnology research and its impact on biodiversity and human health.

At COP16, Vigar presented the Pardee group’s work on low-cost diagnostics at the research and academic caucus and attended sessions related to medical technologies, technology transfer from higher income to lower income countries, and regulation of artificial intelligence in biotechnology.

Vigar says that collaborative research and global perspectives are more important than ever, and he is optimistic that researchers around the world can continue to collaborate.

“Our problems are global. Pandemics, climate change and the global collapse of biodiversity cannot be dealt with by a single country,” he says. “These challenges affecting all of us worldwide require collective action. To me, it’s simple – if we want to solve these problems, we need to work collaboratively.”

Justin Vigar's research is supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Toronto’s Emerging & Pandemic Infections Consortium (EPIC).